Gaming the Game Read online

  “In time, the Pennsylvania State Police helped him hook up a monitoring system for him because they knew the mob was after him,” Battista says, “but Mike still kept me close at his side. Guarding Mike and his family became the way I paid back the thirty-eight thousand I lost out in Vegas playing cards; Mike paid off my debt. I was working all day in the supermarket, and gambling all night in the office for Tiger and Mike. I was making pretty good money—putting all the money I made at the supermarket in the bank, and living off the cash from the gambling. I lived a pretty good life. Around this time, I met a girl named Denise who was going through the beginning stages of a divorce. She was just a beautiful, sweet woman. She was a bartender at Club Manhattan, one of the places I used to stop in when we were done gambling. I used to stop in on Tuesday nights, which were ‘Country and Western’ nights, and she would be bartending. This was one of the clubs Mike owned, and he soon asked me to start bartending there. Well, Denise and I became friends and then started dating after hours, but she was going through a divorce and had two little kids. Mike got mad at me and was like, ‘What are you doing? This girl’s still married.’ So, he said, ‘We’re sending you out to Vegas. Ya know, you can’t be fucking up someone’s life.’ I said, ‘Listen. If they’re gonna get divorced, they’re gonna get divorced.’ So, I went back out to Vegas, stayed out for the whole football season, but she and I still kept in contact. She used to call me from the bar when her shift was done. I came back from Vegas right after the Final Four. Right when I came back, Mike and Tiger were ready to split.

  “Over the next year, I split from Mike to work for Tiger. The two of them were still sharing the betting office, but they were working out the parameters of who was going to have who and what. I started working for a seafood company driving a truck. I was running seafood for them, but my thing was to be booking and betting still and just using their trucks and phones. I’d ship seafood during the day and work in the betting office at night. Denise and I were getting close, but one day I told her, ‘We’ve got to stop this, because people are getting pissed.’ Soon she left her husband, and asked me if I wanted to get married after she was formally divorced. We moved in together, and rented a house in Havertown. I was working with Tiger a lot, and I started working with a guy who worked under him named Bull. He was built like a Bull—stocky, no neck. Now, Tiger was the boss and Bull and I were his two clerks. Bull and I became really close friends, we spent so much time together. When you’re sitting next to a guy that’s two hundred and eighty pounds and likes to eat cheesesteaks and hoagies just as much as you do, and you’re farting on each other and gambling all day long, you develop a relationship!

  “Mike and Tiger were through, and Tiger wasn’t paying anybody a street tax even though there was still this mob war on the street for who was going to control everything.7 We were betting full force with Tiger, and a really sharp guy that worked with Mike named Seal decided to come with us. He was actually shaped like a seal. He had the small head with the awkward body shape of a seal. He had had enough with Mike because he knew Mike couldn’t pick winners. Well, Seal’s deal was based on a percentage of Mike’s winners. Tiger was a proven winner and used more math and fundamentals in his gambling. Now Tiger was the boss, and it was Tiger, Sheep, Bull, and Seal. Some people started calling us ‘Th e Animals’ and the name stuck.”

  The Tiger-led Animals also altered their operation and were exclusively professional bettors for the rest of their careers. “By now,” Battista says, “the police and the feds knew all about us, and the Philly mob was still trying to get into us, so we started to get away from booking to focus more on betting. We wanted to have a better lifestyle and not deal with all the hassles from bookmaking. We knew that law enforcement fucked with bookmakers but they didn’t really fuck with gamblers. Since we had each been arrested a couple of times, we figured it was a good move to just bet. Besides, we were sharp enough by then that we could make good money betting without booking. It was also nice not having to try and beg people to pay off their bets and stuff like that. You always had so many customers who owed you money when you were booking. A guy would owe you ‘X’ amount of dollars, but he only made ‘Y’ amount of dollars and he had a house, car, wife, kids. We got stiffed a lot, like most bookmakers, so we were pretty confident we could make as much betting.

  “Seal was doing the baseball, and Tiger was doing the pro football. College football we could never pick anything good. Seal got us hooked up with a guy named Dinky, a Jewish friend of his who got us piped into some sharp guys for betting baseball—a really famous card player, and The Kosher Kids. The Kosher Kids were Jewish guys out of New York, and they were the best in baseball. We got hooked into them, and they asked us to move games. We were another out for them, using our markets. We would be handicapping baseball, moving baseball, and we were stronger than ever. We were dictating the numbers, and The Koshers were just fucking destroying people. They wouldn’t let anyone know what they were doing, and they’d bet all ‘dogs.’ They had inside information and knew the numbers. They’d work six or seven weeks, take millions out of the market, and then just quit and walk away. Our deal with them gave us a healthy living, but we had to keep moving from place to place because more and more people knew what we were doing.”

  As Battista and his Animal pals saw their stature rise, they were absolutely convinced Mike Rinnier would stop at nothing to exact his revenge for pushing him out of the area’s gambling hierarchy, where he had resided for years. According to Battista, their suspicions were realized not long after the acrimonious split. “In the mid 1990s,” he says, “we were about a month into baseball season, and the police came in with sledgehammers, broke down the door, and we got busted.8 They had been following me, Tiger, and some other guys. We later heard that Mike Rinnier was an informant and had given us up. We thought something was up because the next day we met with him and all of the people he dealt with had been arrested, but not Mike . We were fucked; they had our computers and everything. Within two days, me and Tiger got into his Ford Explorer and took off for Vegas. We didn’t know what was going to happen back home, but we couldn’t miss baseball season.”9

  Jimmy Battista had just married Denise, and now had two little kids to take care of and provide for—all from a distance.10 The heat-of-the-moment Vegas relocation and the ensuing increase in stature within the betting world assured The Sheep some interesting times as he continued his rise to the sports gambling summit.

  Footnotes

  Rizzo was re-elected mayor in 1975.

  Interestingly, John Mastronardo starred for the Villanova University football team before being selected by the Philadelphia Eagles in the 10th round of the 1977 NFL draft (overall pick 259).

  Joseph Mastronardo actually served 18 months in prison, and John Mastronardo served 3 months.

  Manfredi was indicted along with twenty-three others, including mob boss John Stanfa, in March 1994. Twenty-two teams of FBI agents and local law enforcement officers arrested the gangsters early in the morning hours of March 17th as part of a large federal investigation into extortion, loan-sharking, bookmaking, and murder. Manfredi later admitted to being part of a shakedown crew that collected the street tax on behalf of John Stanfa. Though Manfredi pleaded guilty, he did not cooperate with the government. The large Stanfa racketeering case eventually resulted in twenty-six of twenty-nine defendants pleading guilty or being found guilty at trial. The U.S. government identified the remainder of Manfredi’s crew as Sergio Battaglia (convicted), John Casasanto (pleaded guilty), and Herbert Keller (pleaded guilty).

  Though Segich survived, the shooting left his face scarred. Giordano, despite claiming he shot Pirollo and Segich in self-defense and denying he stole from the bookie, was convicted of first-degree murder, robbery, and related charges and sentenced to life in prison.

  Though certainly not fans of Jay, area gamblers like Battista nevertheless felt awful for him because of how close Jay was to his father.

 
Regarding why he split with Mike Rinnier, Tiger says, “There were a lot of reasons Mike and I parted ways, mostly over serious business matters. The easiest way to explain it is that I was a numbers guy, and Mike was a people guy. He never really understood what I was doing, in part because he was so consumed by his other business interests which distracted him from the betting office, that his business model couldn’t survive as people like me, Joe Vito, and especially big-time guys like The Computer, got sharper and sharper. Deep down Mike was a good guy, even though he was a ruthless businessman. He was the one who taught me a lot of what I used for the next twenty years, like paying taxes on your gambling. That saved me, because we got raided a few times over the years and the authorities realized I always paid taxes.”

  Tiger offers some comical insights into such police activities when he says, “When you’re in the gambling office and you hear the wood cracking on the door, you are hoping it’s the police! They don’t knock, and you are praying it’s the cops. You are fucking scared shitless ! That is just an awful feeling.”

  Battista ultimately received ARD and was sentenced to probation and community service (not unlike the outcomes for his other skirmishes with the law relating to his gambling activities).

  As a sign of things to come, Jimmy Battista worked the afternoon shift on his wedding day. “Denise and I got married on a Thursday morning in Elkton, Maryland, which was about forty-five minutes away. We came back and I got changed to go to the gambling office to work the afternoon shift at three o’clock because there was college football that night. After I got off work at eight, we had a big party to celebrate our marriage.”

  Go West, Black Sheep

  THE TRYING COMBINATION of Mike Rinnier’s vindictive actions, related law enforcement heat, and Philly mob extortion prodded The Animals to relocate in Las Vegas. “We feared what Mike Rinnier had done to us,” Battista says. “You also had the war on the streets between Stanfa and Merlino. They were beating up and shaking down bookmakers and bettors, and making everybody pay street tax. It was nuts. So, because of all of that, we went out to Vegas.” Though Seal opted to stay with Rinnier in the Philly suburbs, his loyalties remained with his Animal pals and the men afforded each other various betting-related services—all without Rinnier’s knowledge.

  In Las Vegas, they operated out of, and lived in, a large five-bedroom house not far from The Strip. The gambling office was located downstairs in the living room, where there were a bunch of desks and phones. The room also housed fifteen TVs, which were connected to the various satellites being used to exploit different sports packages. The Vegas office, which afforded them vital, comprehensive and real-time information, was representative of the several betting locations The Animals would utilize in the coming years.1 Typically, there were at least two offices in operation at the same time, with one in Philadelphia and one in Sin City.

  “We chose to work in Philly because booking was just a misdemeanor and they didn’t really care,” Battista says. “In Delaware County, bookmaking was a big deal, whereas in Philly you’d get a slap on the wrist. We weren’t actually bookmaking then; we were only betting, but our reputation was booking and I’m sure the police would have assumed we were booking.” The Animals worked in various offices in the city’s revitalized, yuppie Manayunk section in the late 1990s. Battista’s favorite was in The Mill Studios, where artists had dozens of studios to paint and sculpt, no doubt unaware of the illicit and often immature operations going on beneath them. “It was just me, Tiger, and Bull in an office with a TV, computers, and a bathroom,” Battista says. “The bottom of The Mill had a real dusty basement, with great open space. The owner had it all partitioned, and we had an office down there. You had to go down twenty-five steps and through two locked doors to get down to our office, and no one even knew we were down there. We had a great setup. We had a kitchen area, sofas, a treadmill. Plus, you could yell, scream, fuck around. We used to say you could kill somebody down there and nobody would know. If there was a fire in the building, we would never have known! The only problem was that there were no windows and you never knew what time it was. It was also tough in winter because you’d either freeze or cook like a steak. There was no heat, and when the furnace for the building would kick on the flames would shoot out at us. Those were some crazy times. We did well there, though. We were winning in that basement and didn’t want to fuck with the gambling gods by moving. Baseball was good and we had a great NFL preseason. We worked there straight through the NFL season.” To make matters even better for the food-loving Animals, there was a Greek restaurant right across the street. “We would just sit in that basement and eat greasy Greek food all day and night. We had so much fun—three guys in an office eating, burping, farting, playing cards, and betting,” Battista says. “Running a gambling office and controlling the numbers while staying under the radar was incredible.”

  Staying under the radar would be a key to The Animals’ success and longevity. Ever aware that their activities were always in danger of being discovered by competitors, hustlers, mobsters, and law enforcement officials—each of whom had their own motivations to target The Animals’ betting operation, office locations were changed every so often as a routine course of business. “We tried to be careful with everything, moving offices every so often and not trusting other people to help us,” Battista says. “It was a pain in the ass, but it was all worth it. When we broke from Mike Rinnier, we lost his political protection. Even though it was better in Philly as far as police goes, we had to make sure nobody knew we were there so that the ‘boys downtown’ wouldn’t bother us.” Out of necessity, to capitalize on time-sensitive matters, each of the pro gamblers also had to work out of their homes on occasion. This was kept to a minimum, though, because, as Battista says, “We all had kids and didn’t want to bring the heat on our homes and families.”

  By the late 1990s, The Animals were well established in the big-time sports betting world, and had a sound business model, complete with a betting schedule, risk assessments (within betting decisions and vis-à-vis law enforcement matters), profit margin analyses, and most especially a clearly defined division of labor with Tiger at the helm. “We’d bet preseason and regular season NFL, college football, and pro baseball,” Battista says. “Football was our thing, and we’d pay attention to what the Koshers and the Poker Players did,” so that their baseball wagers could be mimicked. “At the end of every football season in February, we’d go through the company’s business expenses and pay everyone their share. We considered baseball season the start of the new betting year, like a warmup for the real season: pro football. We used to always look at baseball season as grinding pennies. The pennies added up, a few thousand a week, and hopefully by the All-Star break, we’d have a nice bankroll to keep going. We always hoped to have a nice amount of money built up before preseason football got started.” Because they didn’t bet basketball at the time, The Animals very much looked forward to the break between the Super Bowl in late January and the start of baseball season in early April. It was essentially the only time each year they could spend with family without being affected by the hyperactive and demanding sports betting business.

  Battista proudly explains that the foundation for their success was laid immediately following their split with Mike Rinnier, and it required rational, sober decision making and an ability to defer to others. “Believe it or not, we never really argued with each other. Tiger knew pro football like nobody else. Bull dealt with college football totals. I knew all the outs and knew how to get and move the money. Everyone had their niche. There were no egos. We only cared about dollar signs, and that meant accepting what each person did well and letting them do it. The only real debates were over who we should be dealing or betting with, because some people didn’t pay well or didn’t give us good deals.

  “The thing that separates people from being successful or not is that sometimes you just have to sit and listen. You have to look at people as dollar signs. If s
omeone knows more than you, or has better connections than you, accept it and figure out a way to make that work for you. The key to being above everybody else was sitting back and taking everything in. I have seen so many people in that business who thought they knew everything. Meanwhile, people like me would be saying, ‘You’re a fucking idiot. You don’t know what you’re doing. And, you’re done.’ They’d be bragging about all sorts of shit and they’d be dead fucking broke and out of the industry in months.”

  The arrangement with his partners suited Battista well, allowing him to exploit his considerable talents, offering him a great income, and affording him much-desired anonymity. “One of the things I liked about Mike Rinnier is that most people didn’t know how much shit he was doing with booking and betting,” Battista says. “I wanted the same thing. I wanted nobody to really know everything I was doing with gambling, but I wanted all the things that went along with being a big-time gambler.” Included among “the things that went along with being a big-time gambler” for Battista was exploiting inside sports betting information.

  “When I used to work for Mike,” Battista says, “there was a college coach he was friends with who would give us what we called our ‘Big East Game of the Week.’ We’d give him the point spread on a game to pick once a week, and he’d tell us who he liked, taking into account the spread. He had such incredible insight on stuff we couldn’t have known. That was the first time I knew inside information was being transferred between parties. You always heard stories, but I thought a lot of that was bullshit. I started realizing that there was so much inside information being traded. We had a bookmaker friend of ours who had a college basketball ref that bet games with him. One time, the bookmaker called and asked us if we could get three hundred thousand down for him on Georgetown plus-seven because the ref was on the take. No matter how good you are with numbers, you’re not going to win more than fifty-five to fifty-eight percent without inside information.